Teilhard for Troubled Times (blog series by Cynthia)

“… our real task at this evolutionary cusp is not to lose sight of what is coming to us from the future, the vision of our common humanity that is indeed “groaning and travailing” to be born.” ~ Cynthia Bourgeault

The Omega Center has posted a 3-part blog series by Cynthia, entitled “Teilhard for Troubled Times.”

Part 1 – Deep Hope Flows Over Deep Time

I don’t know what kind of divine nudge it may have been that prompted me in January 2015 to challenge the students in my Wisdom network to a deep dive into Teilhard, but the response was electric, to say the least. Over the ensuing eighteen months we collectively chomped our way through The Human Phenomenon, The Divine Milieu, and The Heart of Matter in both online formats and on-the-ground Wisdom schools and retreats. Students who really caught the Teilhard bug read even more widely, exploring the entire range of his canon from the magnificent early mystical upwellings in Writings in Time of War to the profound final synthesis in The Christic, completed less than a month before his death.

The second hopeful resource that Teilhard brings to our unsettled political times is his unshakable conviction that evolutionary progress will unfold its ultimate triumph in the realm of the personal. While our postmodern temperament has a well-engrained tendency to regard the world through a filter of distrust, in which the bits and pieces inevitably appear “random” and disconnected—certainly impersonal—Teilhard encourages us to see our planetary home as a coherent and increasingly compassionate whole, steadily plying its way along its irreversible evolutionary trajectory. In the big picture, there is nothing to suggest that evolution has gone off track. But there is plenty to suggest that we are entering a critical new phase in which some old-order planetary survival strategies are giving way to a new and more intentional sense of mutual interdependence. Continue reading on the Omega Center website HERE…

Part 3 – The Living Reality of Omega!

The third and most powerful wellspring of hope that Teilhard has to offer us—for those with “eyes to see and hearts to hear”—is the assurance that this slow toiling of the planet toward Omega is not merely some hypothetical, futuristic theory. Omega is neither abstract nor hypothetical; it is already present, actively suffusing and permeating the earth with its telluric energy. “I probably would never have dared to consider or form the rational hypothesis of it,” Teilhard writes in The Human Phenomenon, “if I had not already found in my consciousness as a believer not only the speculative model for it, but its living reality.” (HP, 211).

That “living reality,” is of course, the radiant heart of Christ, which Teilhard first met as a child and which continued to grow in him throughout his life as a palpably real and personal presence. Not only his own heart but the entire planet, were increasingly enfolded within the immediately experiential realm of “the Christic.” Continue reading on the Omega Center website HERE…

Teilhard’s conviction that faith is not something that we have but something that we do is perhaps the best antidote possible to the despair and distrust that paralyze so much of our post-modern moral resolve. ~ Cynthia Bourgeault

Follow-up

As a follow-up, Wisdom community member Marty Schmidt shares his reflections on Cynthia’s blog series, describing some of his experiences as a Humanities teacher at the Hong Kong International School. Read how Marty explores hope and meaning with his students in “Teaching Teilhardian Hope in Hong Kong” HERE,

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